Baumgartner studied at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, from 1988 to 1994 before completing her Masters in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London in 1999. Baumgartner is best known for the monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills, for Example 1 Sekunde, in which she documented a single second of video in a series of 25 woodcuts. She has said that she is "interested in woodcut for conceptual reasons and not just for the love of the material...it's about bringing together the different mediums of the video still and the woodcut, about combining the first and the latest reproduction techniques to produce an image...." She first came to public attention in the UK in EAST international in 2004 with her print Shack and a year later with a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. She was included in the groundbreaking exhibition at MoMA, NY, Eye on Europe.

In 2009 she received the Teresa Bulgarini Prize for her woodcuts which deal with concepts of time, motion, velocity and acceleration. In 2012 she was awarded the first ever Goethe-Institut artist's residency in Vietnam, jointly sponsored by the state of Saxony. She began her three-month stay with an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Hanoi - Holzschnitt im digitalen Zeitalter (woodcut in the digital age) and finished with a tour around the country's art schools, sharing her experience in the art of woodcut.

Baumgartner’s works are included in the collections of Albertina (Vienna), the Städel (Frankfurt), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Kunsthaus Zurich, Museum der bildenden Künste (Leipzig), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Spendhaus (Reutlingen), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), The New Art Gallery Walsall and Victoria and Albert Museum (London), among others.